The Epic Hero by Dean A. Miller (review)

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REVIEWS85 to escape a materialistic present, making romantic medievalism currently so popular, is well served by this noble text and its entrancing illustrations. MURIEL WHITAKER University ofAlberta dean A. miller, The Epic Hero. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv, 501. isbn: 0—8018-6239-6. $52. I began my reading of Dean A. Miller's The Epic Hero, all 500 pages of it, in some excitement, caught up in the dark cold of northern Europe at the winter solstice, at the turn ofa new millennium. Here, I thought, might be an appropriate contemporary challenge to the dated (not to say naive) wanderings ofLord Raglan, Joseph Campbell, and the like. As I read, however, my excitement turned to qualified disappointment. Miller's ambitious book sets out to explore '"the" absolute hero, in his clearest and starkest outline' (viii). Seven lengthy chapters aim to sketch a biography (and even thanatography) of 'the archaic, traditional, or premodern hero' [^). Miller tries, wisely, to distinguish his readings of properly epic heroism from the more general and, as he notes, 'grandly reductive' mythic readings ofRaglan and Campbell. Rather, Miller wishes to explore the hero ofan aristocratic, warrior-centered stratum ofculture, 'the warrior ideal, encased in the special epic description ofhis adventures' (viii). But Miller's success is partial, as he quickly and repeatedly departs from epic to speak of mythological tales, medieval romance, tragic drama, and folklore, and his focus depends on an oddly circumscribed notion of epic. Miller's 'epic' appears to include the cosmopolitan Aeneid and the Christian romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but not Spenser or Milton; the Iliad, the Ossetian Nart tales, but not Gilgamesh or other pre-Homeric epics. In short, the title is a misnomer for a more circular book about 'the hero of (some) heroic narratives.' The substantial value ofthe book emerges in the second and succeeding chapters, as Miller presents us with the life, environment, and death of his hero. Miller asks compelling questions and synthesizes intriguing responses on the basis of extensive reading. Throughout, I was charmed by the wealth ofdetail and the sense offamiliarity as I explored (for example) the hero's birth, family, companions, and sexual patterning, or the natural and supernatural spaces the hero traverses. Few writers are able to move with any grace and agility in only one paragraph on the hindrance ofarmor in heroic combat from the Iliad to the Georgian Lord of the Panther-Skin to the Nibelungenliedto Rolandxa the Shâh-nàma and on to Irish legend (214—15). These are Miller's key achievements, when he shows us unlooked-for commonalities across a broad range of material. While many of these comparisons are familiar—color symbolism, the liminal quality ofthe hero—Miller extends and deepens our awareness of them. Many of them are also open to useful debate: Miller's concentration on the death of the hero's son (as if it were simply opposed to the oedipal scenario), or in another register his repeated recourse to Dumézil's questionable tripartite functions. Despite my many reservations, I admire the final chapter, particularly rich in diagrams 86ARTHURIANA (of warrior types, of the heroic 'life grid,' of the trickster and others) that suggest themselves both as useful teaching tools and as heuristics for further investigation. The first chapter, on the other hand, is the longest, the most dense with academese and learned quotations, and the most off-putting. The reader moves with difficulty through unhelpfully subtitled sections, reductivist history, and the occasional dubious claim. For example, Lucan's Pharsalia did not 'set the pattern' for imagining the East in signs of 'threatening and unmanning femininity' (17). The Aeneidhia already set that pattern firmly, following hints as early as the Iliad itself. This last, however, leads to serious questions about the editing ofthis long book. One might excuse Louis Carroll, rather than Lewis Carroll or Charles Dodgson, dropping his Alice down a rabbit hole (156). Or the odd surfacing ofancient chivalry in European 'cavalry regiments as late as the ninth century,' rather than the nineteenth (13). But we also discover strange characters like 'the "proud maiden" Oryo in Beowulf (112). Perhaps Modthryth is...

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